Von:
http://www.letsrun.com/2003/epoqa.php
Question:
3) If the blood test doesn't have to be performed, then why does it exist? Not only do you say it is unnecessary, but it seems quite invasive and expensive to test athletes' blood when a simple urine test could be done.
Believe it or not, the
blood EPO test is much cheaper than the urine EPO test. The
blood test costs somewhere in the ballpark of
$60, whereas the
urine test costs approximately
$400 per test. The reason for this is that conducting the urine EPO test takes up a lot of the time of the technicians in the lab (sometimes up to two or three days) . Thus, the blood urine test can be used in situations to save money.
If would be very expensive to conduct a urine EPO tests on all athletes at $400 a pop. Thus the blood EPO test can be used to determine which athletes are most likely to be on EPO, and then the urine EPO test can be administered on this smaller sub sample.
For example purposes only, assume there are 100 athletes and only 1 has used EPO. It would cost $40,000 ($400 *100=$40,000) to test all of them for EPO using the urine EPO test. Instead if the blood test can be used on all the athletes to determine which 10 athletes are most likely to be EPO users, then the expensive urine test can be administered on the 10 suspect athletes and a lot of money can be saved. Combining the blood and the urine test only costs $10,000 ($60*100= $6,000 for the blood test on all the athletes and then 10 * $400= $4000 for the urine test on the 10 suspect athletes).Thus in this hypothetical example, using both the blood and urine test together would save approximately $30,000 as the blood and urine test combination costs only $10,000 versus the $40,000 it would cost to do the urine test on all the athletes.
